This document relates to content presentation.
The Internet enables access to a wide variety of content items, e.g., video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, news articles, etc. Such access to these content items has enabled opportunities for advertising. For example, web pages can include one or more advertisement slots in which advertisements can be displayed.
Advertisement slots can be sold at a predefined price or sold in a spot market auction. For example, an advertisement slot can be sold in a spot market auction based on effective values of bids (e.g., actual CPM bids or estimated forward looking CPM bids) that are received in for the advertisement slot. In turn, the winning bidder (e.g., advertiser) is the bidder that submitted the maximum bid for the advertisement slot. This bidder will pay an amount less than or equal to its maximum bid price depending on the bids submitted by other bidders and the type of auction performed.
Bidders may also set budgets for online advertising. The budgets can limit the amount that each bidder spends over a predefined period (e.g., day, week, or month) for advertisement slots. For example, when an advertiser's budget has been exhausted, the budget can prevent the bidder's bid from being considered in further auctions until the predefined period ends. Thus, the bidder will not have an opportunity to advertise again until the beginning of a new predefined period or the bidder changes or overrides the budget.
When advertisement slots are allocated according to auctions and/or using advertising budgets inequities and inefficient allocation of advertising slot inventory can occur. For example, advertisements may appear together on a same page even though the advertisers are paying substantially different prices for presentation of the advertisements. Similarly, the absence of a budget-limited bidder in subsequent auctions can alter the demand for advertising slot inventory such that other bidders can obtain the advertisement slots at prices much lower than were previously paid when the budget-limited bidder was competing in the auction.